by Isaac Asimov
The scent—something like sharp lavender—tickled his nose as he entered the forest.
It would have been easy for Kru to lose him in this haze. But she only glanced back a few times to see that he kept up, and made no move to run. Masid still mistrusted her, but not because she seemed unreliable or somehow a traitor to Tilla. Rather, it was her barely contained paranoia that bothered Masid. She cared for Tilla, was clearly devoted to her, and trusted nothing outside her own ability to protect Tilla. Masid had yet to get past her inability to accept anything beyond the small apartment, beyond herself and Tilla, as benevolent. She wanted Masid gone. But she would not betray him at the risk of compromising Tilla. It was a precarious place to put his confidence.
Nor would she disobey Tilla’s direct orders.
“Who’s this Rekker we’re going to see?” Masid asked.
“You’ll find out. He probably won’t talk to you anyway.” She glanced around. “Now shut up.”
After half an hour, the forest thinned, then they stepped into a clearing. Masid looked at the ground—grassless, dark, a few local mosses stretched into the area, which formed a large circle. In the center stood a round structure of old metal sheeting, plastic, and a roof of thatch made of a combination of synthetic clothes, plastic strips, and native branches and dried leaves. Off to the right he saw the scattered piles of cannibalized equipment, old barrels and crates, and piles of junk gradually recombining into indecipherable configurations.
There seemed to be no way into the structure. Kru held a hand up to stop Masid, then approached.
“Rekker?” she called. “Got visitors. You here?”
“Yeah!”
“Got visitors.”
“You said. Who?”
“Come out and see.”
“Shit . . .”
From behind the structure a tall, lanky man with long, dark hair ambled out. He wore a faded jumpsuit with the sleeves cut off and oversized boots. Masid was surprised to see a clean-shaven face.
He stopped a few paces from Masid. “I’m Rekker,” he said. “You know Kru, I guess.”
“Slightly.”
“Uh-huh. That’s all anybody knows Kru.” He turned a bright grin on her. “Just kidding. Who is he?”
“Tilla trusts him,” Kru said.
“Ah. I won’t ask if you do.” Rekker fixed a narrow look on Masid. “And why does Tilla trust you?”
“We work for the same people, I suppose,” Masid said.
“Mmm. I don’t like those people.”
“I’m not fond of most of them myself.”
“Why work for them, then?”
Masid shrugged. “I get to set my own hours, there’s lots of travel, and I meet many interesting people. Other than that, it’s a job. Have to do something.”
Rekker stared at him for a long time, then chuckled. “Good bet you want data. Come inside.”
Masid followed the tall man around to the opposite side of his abode. There, the walls failed to meet, one end missing the other by more than a meter, forming the entrance. Within, Masid found a workbench that followed the curve of the inside wall nearly halfway around the circumference. Unlike the junk and refuse piled on one side of the clearing, here everything was neat and orderly. Equipment hummed and pulsed quietly. A tidy workshop.
The other half of the interior contained chairs, a big couch, small tables, and the bulking cube of a hygienic module. A sleeping roll lay on the plastic floor.
“Tilla must’ve said it was okay or Kru wouldn’t’ve brought you here,” Rekker said, dropping abruptly onto the couch. He waved at a chair. “That doesn’t mean I won’t make my own judgment about whether to trust you. Where were you born?”
“Proclas.”
Rekker’s ample eyebrows snapped up. “Settler? And you’re working for Earth? How does that work?”
Masid rounded on Rekker. “All this talk about whether or not I’m trustworthy, nobody’s said anything to relieve my doubts about you.”
Rekker nodded. “What do you want to know?”
“First, what’s a Spacer doing living the primitive life?”
Rekker’s face froze in an unreadable mask for several seconds. Slowly, he grinned again. “That’s good. How do you know?”
“Trade secrets. Do you want to explain yourself?”
“Tit for tat.” He frowned. “Whatever that means. Old phrase. Anyway, I’m the one with something you need, so you satisfy my curiosity first. If I don’t like what I hear, you go back to town with nothing more than a big question mark about things nobody else on this planet gives much of a damn about.”
Masid considered his options. “All right,” he said. “I was seconded to Terran Offworld Security after a little misunderstanding placed me in thrall to Settler Coalition Intelligence. Ended up working for the security chief on Kopernik Station, a woman named Sipha Palen.”
“I don’t know her. Last time I had any current knowledge about Kopernik, that post was held by a man named Golvat.”
“Palen’s predecessor. He retired.”
“Golvan was competent and unimaginative, but he was honest. What’s Palen like?”
“Dead.”
Rekker scowled. “Sorry. Did you like her?”
“More. I respected her.”
“I see. Is your being here related to her death?”
“Intimately.”
“You think her killers are associated with Nova Levis?”
“I think here is what the killers were protecting. I think the orders came from people either here or concerned with here. Nova Levis is a great big problem. I don’t think the people on the blockade have the first idea how big.”
Rekker grinned. “Shit, you got that right! So who are you working for now?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe myself. We had an encounter with someone who probably came from Nova Levis, mainly Nova City. No other explanation, really, since he was working for people who seemed to have a vested interest in this place. A really unusual encounter, nothing I ever saw before. Kru suggested you might be able to tell me something about it.”
Rekker glanced curiously at Kru. “She was there?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“She calls them reanimés. If they’re what I think they are, we called them cyborgs.”
“Do you always trust this large?” Rekker asked.
“I haven’t told you anything yet that would cost you your life.”
“No, probably not. Just so I’m clear, was that a threat?”
“I don’t make threats.”
“I bet you don’t. Well.” Rekker slapped his knees loudly and laughed. “Cyborgs. You say you encountered one? I find that hard to credit.”
“Why?”
“’Cause they don’t work right. None of ’em. Every single one has something wrong with it. And just so we’re clear, that was a confirmation. The reanimés are cyborgs. People don’t like that word, maybe it still hasn’t occurred to them yet that that’s what they’re dealing with. To most people on Nova Levis, they aren’t even real. Ghost story, something to scare their kids at night. Lurkers in the jungle, so to speak. I’ve even heard some people theorize that they’re indigenes. Whatever, they don’t come around. Humans and cyborgs don’t share a lot in common. For that matter, cyborgs are like Solarians.”
Masid stared at the man for a long time, stunned. Finally, he shifted in his chair and leaned forward. “Who are you?”
Rekker grinned. “Why, I’m glad you asked that, son. I’m a man with a failed mission. I’m the original Spacer legate to oversee the Settler transition.”
Masid remembered a name from the colonial history report he had skimmed: Prent Rekari, Keresian. He had been present during the initial phase of the Church of Organic Sapiens’ settlement program, supervising the exchange of authority between the Solarian mission and the new colonial government.
“I thought you were dead,” Masid said.
“The report still says that?” H
e laughed. “Well, there you are. I’m a ghost. But believe me, I’m the genuine article.”
“One thing about my exile,” Rekker said, working at a large, much-repaired food recycler, “is the refreshing absence of fuck-all interstellar politics. Until, that is, the blockade sealed the planet off.”
He returned with a pair of glasses containing a milky drink. He handed one to Masid. Kru huddled on one of the oversized chairs, pointedly ignoring them, anxious to return to Tilla.
“You’ve been here almost thirty years then,” Masid said.
“Has it been that long? You lose track with the various circadians all competing for command of your biology. I was here . . . let me see . . . thirty-three years ago local time, when the transfer began. I had a nice office in Nova City then.”
“What happened?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out. It’s difficult when you only know this end of things. But basically I was kidnapped. The transition between Solarian authority to colonial control was not going to be a smooth ordeal. The Solarians are a jealous, possessive lot, I’m sure you know, but they’re also loathe to make any kind of direct contact with other organisms, including each other. That’s why they use us as their diplomatic infantry. But that also means that errors in translation—their wishes versus colonial demands or even local necessity—are inevitable. Solaria wanted to maintain a presence, mainly in Nova City. That made sense, that’s where all the latest infrastructure was based anyway.”
“But?”
“But the Settlers wanted no robotic presence anywhere around them. Out of sight, preferably off the planet. They knew they couldn’t get that, so the negotiations were all to do with how much and where and what could be done in the case of violations.”
Rekker took a long drink. “Now, Nova Levis—or, as it was previously known, Cassus Thole—had been primarily a mining planet. We had robot launch facilities all over the mountains, satellite mining stations scattered across most of the main continent, and some processing facilities. On-ground mining was simply too lucrative to pass up, a lot of the ores were so close to pure to begin with, but even so, the bulk of the profitable mining was done offworld. Tau Secordis has very rich asteroid fields, and there are a couple of big rocks that barely qualify as planets we worked, too. There shouldn’t have been a problem, just a lot of tedious clean-up. Robots can remove themselves just as efficiently as they settle in. The only real problem should have been the biomanagement plant.”
Masid frowned.
“Oh, yes,” Rekker laughed. “We’d stretched a couple of points to the Settler Coalition about the actual habitability of Cassus Thole. By the time the COS arrived, we’d turned vast stretches of the plains to agriculture. Very profitably, too, I might add. That was part of the terms of the lease. But to do that required a considerable degree of direct reforming intervention. The Solarians built a plant near the southern pole to manage the biosphere reclamation and transition.”
“I thought the planet was human habitable when it was found.”
Rekker laughed sharply. “No such thing, Settler, no such thing in the universe! When you people started coming out from Earth a couple centuries ago, you’d been sold a story about how easy it was. After all, hadn’t we Spacers simply found a whole slew of wonderfully empty planets, biologically tabula rasa, just waiting for our benevolent transplantation of native Earth flora and fauna to turn them into paradises?” He leaned forward. “We’d found hundreds of planets that were useful. That doesn’t mean they were ready for people to move in. Some of them had very aggressive biospheres, a few of which are still unsuitable for colonization. We took the ones that were easiest to terraform and started working on the rest. I’m sure we originally intended to expand into more than just fifty worlds, but . . .” He shrugged elaborately.
“Still,” he continued after a pause, “there was a lot of credit to be made managing new worlds and when the whole Settler Program got going, we thought we had found a way to get rich and stay safe at the same time. So we . . . withheld a few details. Nothing that hasn’t worked out just fine in the long run. Two centuries now and the Settler worlds are beginning to reach a point where they can go out and settle their own dependent colonies.”
“But they all needed work.”
“Right. And Cassus Thole needed a lot. Remember, originally it was just going to be a mining planet. We didn’t need to be able to stroll in the woods for that.”
“Why lease it in the first place?”
Rekker shook his head. “I don’t know. I was never given a justification for that. I’m sure you could ask the same question about a dozen or more other worlds we’ve leased. Why? Someone thought it was a good idea. I thought it was silly at the time, but my job was to ease the transition, not question the logic.”
“So what went wrong? I assume something went wrong.”
“The colonists wanted the biomanagement plant shut down. It offended them. I had to go back and forth, oh, fifty times, a hundred, with counterproposals, threats, tantrums, retractions, restatements—” He gave a mock shudder. “The crap in the pasture of the universe. It wasn’t good enough that Solaria proposed to simply relocate it to the Spacer zone in Nova City. They wanted it shut down! Idiots. How do you explain to someone who refuses to understand that certain things are necessary to a continued lifestyle? That if this thing that so offends one’s sensibilities goes away, then they will in all likelihood die?”
“What was so fatal?” Masid asked.
“The nitrogen cycle in the biosphere tends to produce an excess of ammonia. One of the byproducts is a cyanotoxin, used by some of the flowering plants to fend off a form of local ungulate that would eat every pollinating grass on the surface. You see the problem. Eliminate the excess ammonia, the ungulates overbreed and eat everything. Leave it alone and maybe take care of it during food processing. But it’s not enough to simply process out the cyanides from the harvests, because during pollination the toxins become airborne. So, you have to revise the cycle.”
“What did you do about the ungulate?”
“Eradicated them. We have some specimens in research zoos.” Rekker raised his hands. “I know, it’s terrible. But sometimes certain biologies just can’t coexist. You can have one or the other, not both.”
“Did it occur to you that the COS might have objected if they’d known?”
“No. They knew. Not a word was said. They wanted their lease.” Rekker shook his head. “I don’t know why we couldn’t have sold them a different planet, somewhere else. Another one of those imponderables. This was the planet agreed upon, it was our job to make it ready for them. They accepted most of the terms. We fixed the biosphere. Somewhere along the way, they failed to understand that a biosphere tends to revert if the revising technologies are withdrawn prematurely. The plant had to remain in place for another century at least before the cycle could be reasonably guaranteed to be permanent. They didn’t like that.”
Rekker finished his drink. He studied the glass as if trying to decide whether to have another. He frowned finally and set it down.
“Solaria decided to move the plant anyway. We were still in the middle of negotiations about it. Solarian authority hired an independent firm to move the facility and start it up. By the time I knew it was happening, it had been shut down and a new containment building was going up in the middle of Nova City. I started digging in for some answers—I hate being kept out of the loop, especially when it’s my word that’s supposed to carry weight with the people involved. They hired a firm called The Hunter Group. I’d never heard of them, but they seemed, on the surface, to know what they were doing. But they were overbuilding the facility. When I asked about it, I was informed that a second lease had been granted to this company to operate a research station on Solaria’s behalf. I thought, ‘That’s strange. I thought Keres had the exclusive rights to negotiate for research facilities.’ Keres did. Solaria was going around us. I started complaining. I was told to finish the ne
gotiations first. But that just annoyed me more.”
“You kept asking questions.”
“And I was kidnapped for my troubles. Taken right out of my bed in the middle of the night. Very melodramatic. They held me in the remains of the south polar station. Very cold.”
Masid smiled wryly. “Did you find out anything about Hunter before they kidnapped you?”
“Now here’s where you and I have to do our own negotiation. So far I haven’t told you anything that would get you killed. But from this point on we have to learn to trust on more than just the say-so of a mutual friend.” Rekker looked past Masid to Kru. “No offense intended toward Tilla, but this is where it gets serious. In fact, maybe it’s best you not listen.”
Masid glanced back at Kru. She glowered at them both. “If you want to go back to Tilla—”
“She told me to see you get back safe,” Kru snapped. She stood. “I’ll wait outside.”
When she had left, Masid said, “Let me ask you a question first. Why do you trust Tilla?”
“Well, you get tired of not trusting people. Look at poor Kru. She spends every waking moment in fear of other people. Tilla rescued her from a serious addiction and she’s been faithful ever since, especially when Tilla got too sick to be threat to her. That’s no way to be.” Rekker sighed. “But that’s only part of the answer. Kru, I suppose, showed me that Tilla’s a good person at heart. She didn’t have to do anything to help the girl. In fact, she could have used her, done half the job and made her completely dependent. But the fact is, she convinced me that she really believed in wanting to help. She and her team could have gotten out of here long before they were compromised. There was even a chance shortly after. But they had a job and they were dedicated. I’m completely awed by that kind of dedication. I used to have it myself.”
Masid regarded the Spacer for a long moment. Then: “Hunter is a front for an arms dealer named Kynig Parapoyos. Do you know the name?”
